Communications of the ACM
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From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Safety First!
Software misbehaves all too often. This is a truism, but also the driving force behind many computing techniques intended to increase software reliability, safety...
From Communications of the ACM
Safe to the Last Instruction: Automated Verification of a Type-Safe Operating System
High-level computer applications build on services provided by lower-level software layers. Unfortunately, today's low-level software still suffers from a steady...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Making Untrusted Code Useful
The following paper combines two important themes in secure computing: assurance and information flow control. For high assurance, a system's Trusted Computing...
From Communications of the ACM
Making Information Flow Explicit in HiStar
Features of the new HiStar operating system permit several novel applications, including privacy-preserving, untrusted virus scanners and a dynamic Web server with...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Abstracting Abstract Machines
Semanticss-based program analysis requires one to (1) start from a "friendly" semantics; (2) design a "congenial" lattice...
From Communications of the ACM
Abstracting Abstract Machines: A Systematic Approach to Higher-Order Program Analysis
Predictive models are fundamental to engineering reliable software systems. However, designing conservative, computable approximations for the behavior of programs...
From Communications of the ACM
Debugging in the (Very) Large: Ten Years of Implementation and Experience
Windows Error Reporting (WER) is a distributed system that automates the processing of error reports coming from an installed base of a billion machines. WER has...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Is Scale Your Enemy, Or Is Scale Your Friend?
Scale has been the single most important force driving changes in system software over the last decade. Its impact is...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: FAWN: A Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes
The emergence of wimpy processors and FLASH met a promising deployment scenario in the field of large-scale data centers. The energy efficiency potential of these...
From Communications of the ACM
FAWN: A Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes
This paper presents a fast array of wimpy nodes — FAWN — an approach for achieving low-power data-intensive data-center computing.
From Communications of the ACM
Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets
Dremel is a scalable, interactive ad hoc query system for analysis of read-only nested data. By combining multilevel execution trees and columnar data layout, it...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Data Analysis at Astonishing Speed
The importance of data analysis has never been clearer. Globe-spanning scientific collaborations are exploring...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Complex Financial Products: Caveat Emptor
CDOs are examples of financial derivatives, with a value that depends on the underlying assets with which they are linked. These kinds of complex financial products...
From Communications of the ACM
Computational Complexity and Information Asymmetry in Financial Products
Securitization of cash flows using financial derivatives transformed the financial industry over the last three decades. Derivatives...
From Communications of the ACM
Poly-Logarithmic Independence Fools Bounded-Depth Boolean Circuits
The question of determining which (weak) forms of randomness "fool" (or seem totally random to) a given algorithm is a basic...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Patterns Hidden from Simple Algorithms
Is the number 9021960864034418159813 random? To my limited mind, the string appears random. Is there a way to use some formal mathematics...
From Communications of the ACM
Liability Issues in Software Engineering: The Use of Formal Methods to Reduce Legal Uncertainties
This paper reports on the results of a multidisciplinary project involving lawyers and computer scientists with the aim to put forward a set of methods and tools...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Liability Issues in Software Engineering
The paper by LeMétayer et al. addresses one technical issue in a large and serious problem in the production...
From Communications of the ACM
QIP = PSPACE
The collection of computational problems having quantum interactive proof systems consists precisely of those problems solvable with an ordinary classical computer...
From Communications of the ACM